December 13, 2006

I'll tell you what's not unthinkable. A three-sided war between Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey with the US forces caught in the middle. That's not unthinkable. A bloody Turkish occupation of the Kurdish areas is not unthinkable. Al Qaeda rule in Saudi Arabia isn't unthinkable either. These are among the real possibilities that Bush has given us.

What's unthinkable is that any American should suffer adverse career consequences because of their advocacy of the war. Bush and Cheney will be untouched and will finish out their terms. The rabble of advisers from PNAC and other groups who promoted the war with lies, distortions, and wishful thinking will continue to pull down their salaries and will continue to appear on TV. The journalistic cheerleaders who stovepiped misinformation will continue to collect hefty salaries and will continue to share their opinions with us.

We've been hearing a lot of talk about Democrats "taking political advantage of the situation", but the ball is really in the other court now. The ones who are behaving shamelessly and destructively right now are the ones who are trying to salvage the Bush administration. We cannot allow the Bush administration to be salvaged. If Bush and Cheney remain in power, they will make things much worse.

Bush and Cheney stand condemned by history, and their enablers and apologists (including the Democrats among them) stand condemned too. But I doubt that a single one of them will suffer any real consequences during their own lifetimes, and I fear that the world twenty years from now will be as strange to those of us who remain alive then as the world of 1934 was to anyone who could still remember 1914.

Posted by John Emerson at December 13, 2006 9:51 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.seeingtheforest.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-t.fcgi/2563